07mk
29d ago
Since G is right next to H, my first response to learning this information was, "The author of A People's History of the United States happened to be there and also decided to, in the moment by snap decision, run interference for the assassin!?" Of course, Howard and George are different names. Basic research doesn't reveal any relation between those 2, but I hope it comes out that it's his nephew or cousin or something. Would make this timeline that much more dank, or whatever the kids these days are saying.
07mk
29d ago
Is it because Luigi's cute and has six pack abs?
I'd guess this is 99% of it. Whatever difference between how the killers are lauded probably has little to do with the specifics of the killings, because the joker-types are lauding the killings about equally, by my reckoning. But being seen fawning over someone who looks like Luigi is much better for your status than fawning over someone who looks like Tyler.
07mk
29d ago
"The twin towers fell as they lived, a monument to capitalist excess and oppression of the Muslim people" would get you pilloried by both left and the right in the weeks following 9/11.
This is accurate but misleading. While there would be pillorying coming from both the left and the right, there would also be plenty of praise and agreement coming from the left. This wouldn't take the form of "well, if you think about it, it's a fair point about capitalist excess that shouldn't be lost in the wake of this immense tragedy" or "it's a shame that these poor Arabs were so disenfranchised that they felt they had no options other than suicidal terrorism" or whatever, it would be, "Hell yes, America deserved it for holding up this structure that oppresses Muslims; perhaps fear of this kind of random, senseless reprisal is a good thing for American citizens to have." I know this, because I said as much on 9/12/2001, surrounded by like-minded leftists on my American high school campus. This wasn't the mainstream opinion or even that popular, but it certainly wasn't uncommon by any stretch, and it received almost zero push back from the more mainstream leftists at the time.
This was a pre-social media era, so the dynamics around cancelation or social attack vectors for and against enemies didn't exist the same way, and I'd guess we'd have seen similar dynamics as we see around Kirk now if 9/11 had taken place post-Twitter: lots and lots of extreme leftists openly celebrating the event, lots more mainstream leftists running interference for them to justify why such celebration is understandable, and lots of rightists trying to cancel the leftists. Without social media, these celebratory leftists such as myself were just not seen by much of the mainstream and the right, and cancellation also didn't occur much
07mk
29d ago
What's hard to reconcile about this analogy? The difference between an active system and a set of ideas aren't material for the analogy to work. In either case, we have the individual himself who is fully responsible for the actions he took and also the systems around him that encouraged and/or enabled him to take such actions. If the system had been set up differently, even someone exactly as deranged or as unmoored as these young men wouldn't, on the margin, have enacted the violence they had; by being in prison or by just deciding that having bad opinions doesn't deserve a death sentence. When we set up a system to protect innocent bystanders from deranged lunatics since deranged lunatics will always exist, we should probably lock them up long-term after they've indicated a penchant for ignoring the law. When we set up a system to reduce political violence (a good that goes beyond merely just reducing violence, due to how it enables poltical engagement by people who don't need to fear violence against them), we should probably discourage memes and ideologies that glorify assassins or assassinations or dehumanize people based on their political beliefs, since unmoored young men have a penchant for picking up these ideas and acting on them.
07mk
29d ago
This seems like trying to determine if that poor Ukrainian woman's murder was caused by a deranged psycho or by a system that allowed a deranged psycho to go in and out of the system over a dozen times without deciding to lock him up long-term. It's clearly both. Deranged psychos will always exist, no matter how hard we try to prevent them from existing, and so it's incumbent on us in the rest of society to keep us protected from deranged psychos.
Unmoored young men will always exist, and they will always turn to violence. Yes, we can work on the root causes that are making men more unmoored (well, theoretically we can - empirically, perhaps we can't), but also, we must operate under the reality that there will always be unmoored men who will turn to violence, and that how much they turn to violence and what forms of violence they turn to are not immutable facts of nature but rather modulated by their culture. Thus those among us who believe that a lack of political violence is preferable have a responsibility to call out ideologies that are more encouraging of channeling that penchant for violence towards bad, unproductive forms of violence like political assassinations.
I'm not sure what you're insinuating. Personally, I've seen so many commenters who are following darwin2500's standard playbook of deflection, obfuscation, non-central fallacy that I'm convinced that there are many of his acolytes out there that will be indistinguishable from darwin2500 himself in text form.
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